The People's Peking Man: Popular Science and Human Identity in Twentieth-Century China (review)

You probably know the outlines of the Peking Man saga—how a unique series of early human (Homo erectus) remains was unearthed at a site near Beijing between 1926 and 1937; how these fossils were studied briefly, mainly by foreign scientists; and, ªnally, how they were lost during their evacuation as the Japanese invaded in 1941. You will not know much more about these Chinese icons when you finish reading Schmalzer's book, which is much-better described by its subtitle. The Peking Man fossils float occasionally to the surface in a variety of contexts, but this significant work is much more importantly a wide-ranging exploration of how Chinese paleoanthropology and paleontology have been tossed around on the stormy seas of political change over the last century or so.

It is hard for American scientists to imagine, far less to comprehend, the capricious and intimidating ideological and social pressures that their Chinese colleagues have faced throughout this long period. I remember my own feelings of astonishment back in the late 1960s when I read a distinguished Chinese colleague's recently published monograph on the extinct giant ape Gigantopithecus. In it he dilated at length on this fossil primate's alleged relevance to Engels' dictum of "labor created man," before finally getting down to business in the last couple of pages.¹ Soon after, it became clear why. During the Cultural Revolution of 1966 to 1976, Beijing's Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (the lineal descendant of the Cenozoic Research Laboratory that was set up to excavate and study the Peking Man fossils) was taken over by workers of the Number One National Cotton Factory. The newcomers marginalized, humiliated, and sometimes physically abused the scientists in residence. Schmalzer does an excellent job of evoking the highly complex working relationships that eventually developed.

Yet, as Schmalzer remarks, even while placing the workers in charge, the Maoist political authorities never managed to reconcile the simultaneous and deeply held beliefs that the masses were both the fount of wisdom and the refuge of "superstition and ignorance." For paleontology, this uncomfortable contradiction was compounded by the facts that most fossil sites were actually discovered by local peasants (who had been collecting "dragon bones" for medicinal purposes from time immemorial) and that expert excavators could also fairly claim to be "laborers." Nonetheless, despite severe official suspicion of expert knowledge, throughout the vicissitudes of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, Chinese science somehow managed to maintain its identity.

Schmalzer shows a particular fascination with the yerén, the local equivalent of Bigfoot, as part of a wide-ranging quest both to understand the place of fossils in popular Chinese views of human identity and to recount the multifarious government attempts to shape that understanding. She also devotes considerable space to current Chinese interpretations of the human fossil record, most of which favor the idea that Homo sapiens, or at least its eastern Asian expression, evolved in China. Although her book is not the place to turn if you are looking for closely reasoned scientific arguments in support (or contradiction) of such notions, it is an incomparable resource if you are seeking to understand the highly complex and nuanced historical and intellectual place our Chinese colleagues are coming from.